Saturday, December 27, 2008

I saw the movie Religulous today and I was actually pretty impressed. The information content on first glance in this movie was accurate and supportable by evidence. Maher's interview style was a little sloppy and several obscure people were interviewed but the overall message of the film was not negatively affected by these things. I did notice the use of the so called "Lord privy seals" which try to evoke emotions in the viewer, but whatever I don't like them but they weren't overly used in my opinion. Maher'sagnosticism and unchallenging nature may help to further expose the public to the ideas of questioning their religions, but considering that it doesn't give answers to questions such as science would, I am sure if this movie were to change peoples beliefs they would probably quickly fall into the pseudoscience realm as plagues much of Europe, or perhaps I am being to pessimistic.

This movie actually had the same feel to it as Prof. Dawkins documentary "Root of all Evil" with a trip to the gaza strip and the interview with an evangelical (although he was a black televangilist type).

Overall I give the movie two thumbs up and would reccomend it to most of the people that I know.

Research Highlights

Zoology: Queen Bee

About epigenetic factors that contribute to the genetically identical bees differentiating into queen bees or workers from feeding on "royal jelly", by way of using RNAi to interfere with specific proteins during development.

Research Highlights

Biophysics: Mob rule

About how protein structures can be modified in-vivo if the amount of space in a cell is limiting or available, very interesting stuff.

And I am not even done reading past the highlights. Check the papers out and I would like to encourage everyone to listen to the Nature podcast and read Nature every Wednesday for free if you attend University or are a faculty member.